Oh Vienna!

[imomus]

There was a slight -- but pleasant -- misunderstanding hanging over my visit to Vienna this week. I thought I'd been flown in to provide some music at an opening party for their new show of videos by artists Korpys and Löffler (one of them, of Bush arriving at Tegel in Airforce One in 2002, actually mirrors closely the Click Opera entry the other day about Akihito's 747). As a musician prepared to do weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs -- whatever it takes to pay the rent -- I naturally accepted.



It was only when I got there and met curators Nicolas Jasmin and Flora Neuwirth that they explained (over weissbier at the Cafe Anzengruber on Schleifmuelgasse) that there was a bit more to it than that. Sure, I'd be performing at the opening party, in a room downstairs from the video installations. But a video would also be made of the performance, which would then be shown on a TV placed in the spot where the performance took place. This would then be joined by five other TVs showing five further performances. There'd also be a lecture from Nate Harrison about the TB-303 baseline composer and clips from philosopher Gilles Deleuze's eight-hour TV series L'Abecedaire. This would all appear under the title Six Sessions, a play on the name of the Secession.

My performance of pop songs (and dances), then, wasn't as throwaway as I thought. It was going to form part of an exhibition at the Vienna Secession, become an artwork in its own right. Right now, in fact, a photo of it is on the front of the Secession website.

This all raises some -- for me, anyway -- interesting questions about how I've changed, how pop music has changed, and how the art world has changed. I can now do pretty much my standard pop concert in the context of an art institution and have it accepted as an art performance. It's just as well, really -- with the trad edifice of the music industry collapsing around our ears, it's good to know that the creative effort we crooners put into our art isn't going to be lost. All those gestures we honed in the darkness of nightclubs can still be made in the brilliant light of the white cube. Rock roadies can be replaced by museum technicians, A&R men by curators. A bulbous, florid art institution in Vienna will give us safe harbour. This is all, frankly, reassuring.



Lest we should get smug, though, a visit to the Konzept.Aktion.Sprache show at MUMOK is a timely reminder of just how much more rock-n-roll than rock-n-rollers artists (and especially, for some reason, Viennese ones) have been prepared to get. Forget Iggy and the Stooges, just watch the Viennese Actionists slashing their bodies, defecating in a continuous loop, and, well, meaning it, maaaaaan. Compared with the out-there stuff going on in Vienna in the 60s, to be (as the Secession website calls me) "a musician and blogger [who] also appears internationally as an imaginary persona and performance artist at galleries and museums" is tame stuff indeed. Then again, could Hermann Nitsch sing a big weepy ballad while butchering a bullock? I think not.



As we drove around the city in a borrowed Audi, curator Nicolas Jasmin casually mentioned that the Artfacts website, which ranks 104,417 artists according to how much and where they exhibit, is now listing me as the world's 3268th (and rising!) most successful contemporary artist! Nicolas himself -- a real artist, as opposed to my flukey crossover charlatanry -- is at 6728. Now, I'm not one to take such stuff seriously -- "This means nothing to me!" -- but I'm not one to let it lie either; I immediately googled other musician-artist types to see where they were. Paul D. Miller is very close to me at 3139 (but falling!). Scanner, though, is inexplicably low, at 22,585.



To think of yourself as a serious artist (and actually be selling your work) you really need to be in the top 500. After the Secession performance I dined at a restaurant called Kiang with a bunch of people grouped around artist Daniel Richter, who teaches at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (the art school that, indirectly, caused World War II by rejecting the young Adolf Hitler). Richter, a painter, is currently at 469 on ArtFacts. Now that's what I call a real artist! No wonder he had an assistant so beautiful I could only gawp in wonder from the far end of the table... and the far end of the art charts. As Midge Ure of New Romanticist art group Ultravox once put it: Oh, Vienna!



buckminster has just posted a clip of the Secession performance here.

Comments

Performance Art or Crime?

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I don't know where this young artist will fit on the artfacts list but he is making a name for himself in Toronto at the moment. Thorarinn Jonsson, an art student from Iceland currently studying at OCAD, planted a fake bomb at the Royal Ontario Museum, filmed a fake bomb blast at the museum which he posted on youtube(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olYjeFFnKFY). The hoax caused an AIDS benefit at the museum to be cancelled which cost them $100,000 in donations. Jonsson was trying to say something about recontextualization, "It’s clearly a sculpture, but taking it out of context and putting it into another context by leaving it lying around, it certainly takes on a different meaning.” He has subsequently been arrested and released on bail, and two of his professors have been suspended from the school, pending an inquiry.